In general, an alkaline protease derived from Vibrio sp. is referred to as an enzyme that degrades proteins into amino acids and small peptides under alkaline condition, and many microorganisms, such as Bacillus sp. and Serratia sp., are well-known to excrete alkaline protease.
The most important factor in producing alkaline protease using said microorganisms is the high productivity of alkaline protease, which affects the costs of producing process.
According to the recent inventions, in order to raise the productivity of alkaline protease, recombinant vectors comprising the gene encoding alkaline protease were prepared using genetic engineering techniques and transformants therewith were prepared.
The present inventors previously filed a patent application (KR 1999-12588) titled “alkaline protease VapK useful as laundry detergent, vapk gene, recombinant expression vector, and transformed microorganism”, in which the microorganism is Vibrio metschnikovii KS1 and the recombinant expression vector is pSBCm. The same microorganism and recombinant expression vector are also used in the present invention.
The present inventors have studied and tested intensively and extensively in order to produce the transformed microorganism with high activity of alkaline protease, and prepared a recombinant plasmid vector comprising the alkaline protease gene doubly, isolated from Vibrio metschnikovii KS1 and transformed Vibrio metschnikovii with the said recombinant plasmid vector, thereby the transformed microorganism with improved protease activity was produced.